Requests to http://api.wordpress.org URLs should 301 to the HTTPS equivalent

[jonoaldersonwp]

HTTPS is available here, but not enforced. This should be resolved for security + performance + quality reasons.

[Otto42]

Those don't redirect on purpose. Old versions of WordPress, pre-3.7, didn't have a copy of the cacert.pem file, so https requests would often fail because they couldn't do certificate verification. Forcing a redirect on http requests here would have the effect of simply blocking the requests from older WordPress installs.

If we want to block old installs and stop supporting them, fine, but we should do that intentionally, not by accident.

[SergeyBiryukov]

There were also cases where wp_http_supports( array( 'ssl' ) ) returns true but in reality the site can't connect because of cURL/certifcate issues, see ​#WP25716 or ​#WP26010 for example.